A country’s potential for economic growth is greatly influenced by its innovations and the endowments of physical (land minerals and other raw materials) and human (proportion of people in the labour force and their level of skills) resources. However, mineral endowment alone is not a guarantee for development and, as a matter of fact, it has only served to engender a regime of retrogression as is the case with many mineral rich countries, Nigeria inclusive.
It is a hard fact that Nigeria has been growing since the attainment of independence, but this growth has not been translated to sustainable development. For instance, Nigeria ranks low in human development index. In terms of quantity, education has grown with high number of primary, secondary and tertiary institutions and increased enrolments. Unfortunately, none of the schools is ranked among the first 1,000 on the Webometric scale.
Public social and economic infrastructure are gradually collapsing while the policy efforts at infrastructure rejuvenation has been on snail speed and following the path of political patronage. Development in the modern world today connotes a transition from a state to another considered to be an advancement and wherein there is a sustained improvement in the quality of life. Though rapidly urbanising, Nigeria is essentially agrarian in economy social and cultural outlook. In spite of this outlook, yield per hectare is still very low since manual and subsistence farming still dominate with land fragmentations and food insecurity becoming the order of the day. Rural economy still remains dominant with industrialisation falling to an unprecedented 2.3 percent annual growth rate. The collapse of the Nigerian rail system and the associated destruction of the highways by heavy duty haulage trucks had accentuated the problems of moving goods and services across the country, thereby limiting access to gainful employment. The challenge therefore before our economic managers is how to use innovations in technology to bring back the railways for its employment generation capacity and potential. In the same vein, the textile industrial sub-sector which was reputed for being one of the labour absorbing industries, needs to be energised, vertically and horizontally in order for it to play its role in the economy, through a sustained public investment and appropriate protection of the would be investors. Such a venture would require, to be successful, a new approach which is a recourse to technological innovations by the country as the basis for laying the foundation for the revival of the economy and overcoming its challenges.
Nigeria has till today been severally described as a country that is endowed with abundant solid mineral resources. About 50 solid minerals were discovered in 500 locations in the country. After independence in 1960, solid minerals particularly coal, tin and columbite ranked high as Nigeria’s foreign exchange earners. With the discovery of oil in 1958 and the accompanying high revenue earned from it, less attention was paid to diversifying the economy which led to a drastic fall in solid minerals production. At the same time, revenue from oil export became high and the term “oil boom” was used to describe the state of the Nigerian economy. This situation led to increased oil exploitation, a development that led to the complete neglect of other sectors.
The neglect of other sectors like the space sector made many analysts to describe the situation as “oil fortune, technological quest misfortune”. The glut in the oil market in the mid-1970s and the early 1980s greatly affected the largely oil revenue dependent Nigerian economy. With a fast growing population, an extensive land mass, an import dependent economy, provision of social amenities became a daunting task for the government. It then dawned on government that the time to diversify the economy had, indeed, come. This was necessary to broaden the national economic base by increasing non-oil export so as to build structures that would ensure Nigeria’s sustainable socio-economic growth.
Fortunately, the government created the ministry of innovation, science and technology with many agencies under it to help it replicate the importance of technology to the national economy like it is done the world over. The importance of the technological sector to the Nigerian economy cannot be over-emphasised because the world over, technology has become and serving as the basis for the growth and development and the needed industrial revolution .
Today, the expo organised by the ministry and which has on display innovations by agencies of the ministry like the National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA) is a welcome development. Even more assuring is the remark by the director-general of the agency, Dr. Halilu Ahmed Shaba, that the future of our country’s economy is indeed bright as the country through its innovations is now on the verge of using technological innovations as a catalyst for industrial production, revenue generation, employment creation, and human capital development. These innovations however have not yet translated into the beneficial consequences for the average Nigerian. Though Nigeria has great technological potential, the challenge is how to convince the authorities to increase substantially the expenditures for these technological innovations so that more of it can be initiated. The nation today attracts little of the huge capital expenditures of the world technology industry and this needs to change because our technology sector has for so long been constrained by insufficient technological investments. This has led to under performance and the consequent loss of economic opportunities for the nation.
For the country to be a ready player in the technology world, the players in the sector must emulate the NASRDA whose management led by Dr Shaba has formulated policies which have successfully helped the agency in co-opting the private sector to invest in the sector as the government cannot do it alone due to competing demands. The agency has shown at the expo that it has successfully changed its narratives by helping in diversifying the economy of the country. Such policies include stable and transparent regulations which clearly spell out the rights and obligations of investors and the federal government. The government should also make sure that there is a competitive and well structured fiscal regime which will provide adequate return on investments and a fair share to the federal government, assure access to foreign exchange at market rates for dividends repatriation as well as operational needs. However, if government continues to follow “the business as usual” policy, increased investments would not materialise and the growth of technology in Nigeria would continue to stagnate.
Musa Wada,
Abuja
